#58 AMERICA FINALLY HAS A GOOD DAY

Amy Acton: Make that good-hearted woman governor!

I’ve long agreed with Winston Churchill’s assessment that democracy was the worst form of government with the possible exception of all the rest.  Democracy, at the very least, allows you to throw the bums out, and so it has.

It’s been at least two years since anything really good has taken place in our politics.  Instead we’ve had a long parade of outrages, incessantly lying lips, corrupt machinations, and raw egotism.  On November 3^rd, the American electorate smacked the Republicans in the mouth in no uncertain terms.  They lost, and they lost BIG at every level of society, in blue states and red, in the state houses, the governorships, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.  It was one monumental middle finger.  Even Donald Trump seemed to get the message.

How do I know he got the message?  For a few blessed days you hardly heard a peep out of the mouth that can’t shut up.  The world’s most bellicose Whiner-in-Chief could barely get out his mantra several days later: “OM THE ELECTION WAS RIGGED SVAHA.”  It definitely wasn’t a bang but a whimper.

When he was asked by Ross Douthat on Sixty Minutes about dying, he said, “as a religious person,” he expected to go to heaven.  In the 250 years of American presidents, there has never been a less religious president than Trump.  When asked whether he could love or forgive some of his enemies so that he might get into heaven, Trump answered with uncharacteristic honesty, “”I probably cannot do that. Because I do hate some of my enemies—and I always will.”

Well, maybe he’ll win brownie points for at least telling the truth.

But let’s go back to the good news.  I don’t think, as I was watching the returns on Tuesday night, that I grasped how thorough a repudiation of Republicans it was.  I went to bed with a light heart.  That was good for at least two or three days.  But as I listened to the post-mortem on the Republicans, they lost their grip in places you’d never think, like Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi.  Their enforced political gerrymandering largely lost them seats.  The very thing that seems to most horrify them—non-white people whom they’ve worked so hard to suppress—blacks, Latinos, indigenous Americans, middle-eastern Muslims—all took power in a resurgence of where America had long been going to make good on its multi-ethnic melting pot.

And there have been a lot of bright lights in this bunch, including two Christian minister senators, Hamilton of Kansas and Talarico of Texas, articulating a liberal Christianity.  I’ve resonated with Talarico’s spiritual politics.  He makes sense to me.  I don’t have to cringe like the Buddhist in me usually would.  He’s standing up for the good heart of Jesus that’s asking us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  He’s not making exceptions to that.  When does big Mr. Christian Pete Hegseth ever sound that way?  When does anyone on the rightwing sound like they genuinely care about us at all?

James Talarico: The man who most terrifies the GOP.

But, as beholden to Christian Nationalism as the Republicans are, young, boyish Talarico scares them sideways.  He’s stepped into their church and started preaching a very different gospel than we’re used to hearing.  He won by twelve points.

That’s what you saw in quite a number of Democratic candidates.  They have their own vigorous voices, maybe none better than Abdul El-Sayed.  A Muslim who ran for senate in Michigan, you can feel the strength and brightness coming off him, hear his ease in difficult exchanges and his indelible precision in debate.  He beat Trump acolyte, Mike Rogers, by seven points.

Maybe nothing sticks with me more than watching Amy Acton about a week before the election talk about that despicable ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, her opponent for governor of Ohio.  Acton had been raped repeatedly by her step-father at twelve years old and social services removed her from her home.  The mother abandoned her totally, and left the state with the husband, so he could avoid prosecution.  Ramaswamy tracked down her mother whom she hadn’t talked to for 50 years, who’s living out of a station wagon with some cats, stuck some words in her mouth, and filmed a commercial of her denouncing her daughter as a liar.

It’s a lot to wrap your mind around the journey Acton had to take in her life to become a doctor and Ohio governor.  Asked about this commercial, she said—and I had no sense of this being some kind of talking point—that her mother didn’t seem well, that she had been taken advantage of, and is anyone actually caring for and helping her?  Somehow she bore no ill will toward her mother and expressed authentic compassion instead.  It brings tears to my eyes as I write it.  Yes!  Make that person governor!  She’s got a bona fide heart.

It’s exactly the general greed and heartlessness of the right that Ramaswamy summed up by putting out that commercial.  Everyone in Ohio knew it.  This was a career destroying move, one people won’t forget.  He lost to Acton by eight points.

Abdul El-Sayed: The light comes off him.

So now the Democrats get to go to Washington and genuinely do something meaningful with the power.  There’s a strain of hand-wringing around this, uptightness about how the farther left candidates will act (will they spend all their time spouting “woke” platitudes and proposing tranny legislation?); another strain of worry comes from the left about the moderates.  Will a Schumer / Jeffries led congress tack as always unimaginatively to the status quo.

Both of these men have political talents that they plied into this Democratic chest-beating moment.  Other things happened too, obviously, like Trump Derangement Syndrome reached all four corners of the United States, and even red districts had had enough.  Finally America caught up with Donald’s corrupt and prevaricating nature.  He’s been riding the coattails of The Apprentice, that phony “reality” show that made him look like the business genius he never was.  He promised many things, like no more wars, and here’s the war and here’s the economic blowback from it. Well, now there’s an electoral blowback.  Black Americans in the south, outraged by Republican attempts to suppress their right to vote, turned out in droves.  The Democrats, inspite of some Schumer-backed bad choices like Haley Stevens in Michigan, raised up a lot of bright lights out of the primaries who caught fire with voters.

And then even an unspectacular lumberjack like Troy Jackson defeated redoubtable Susan Collins in Maine because, I’ll guess, Mainers just couldn’t slog along with her another six years.  Her time had come and gone.  A new era has arrived.  He won by eight points.

Meanwhile, so many governorships have passed to the Democrats suddenly a repeal of the electoral college itself is on the table.  If that happens, a truly seismic shake up of our politics will have arrived.  Republican candidates for president have won the popular vote twice in the past 34 years.  Much of their ability to gain power remains premised on the electoral college.

Schumer has a tired, old man quality that sets no one on fire, and Jeffries has a flatness of affect that…sets no one on fire.  They both have meaningful institutional skills, and whether the Democrats as a whole really drive popular items of change (like Medicare for All) will be down to their willingness and plain old guts as a force in the government to seize this shining moment to flip the country’s karma back into facing the light.  It seems to me that as you listen to them talk—Schumer and Jeffries on down—they want to expose the corruption, get rid of the tariffs, restore social services, and expand health care.

You can complain that they will get vetoed and that the Republicans won’t impeach someone like Hegseth, much less Trump.  But they can put people under oath and in front of cameras.  How about those low level FBI personal who blocked out the names of rich, important white guys in the Epstein files but left in the names of the victimized girls?  The underlings won’t have that religious fervor to protect the Trump sycophants directing them to do it, will they?  That’s how you start to pull the threads and unravel everything, whether or not this immediately produces felony convictions.

If they keep passing bills to repeal the tariffs and the Republicans keep refusing to help, how will that look in the political ads two years from now?  The Republicans remaining in their seats will still be expected—and probably do not know how to act otherwise—to speak in whatever talking points get put in their mouths and stay in lockstep with Trump, no matter how ghastly he acts.  They’ve demonstrated again and again a remarkable spinelessness.  On the other hand, the one thing they do care about is their political future.  They have no real vision or practical sense of what might help the nation or their party.  They live in a paradigm of conspiracy theories and extremist theology.  They go along with the sloppy blowjobs Trump on his knees gives to Putin, for example.  But they do care about their power and position, above all.  When do they start to vote with the Dems in order to save their own skins?

So the Democrats have a chance to step in, stomp the Republicans, show them as utterly weak and corrupt, establish themselves as the party that reflects the interests of the American citizenry, and shift our politics out of Elon Musk’s grimy little hands, and back into a healthy, principled, care for our society at large, all colors, genders, classes, and ages.  Imagine waking up every day to a politics that was working on that.  Suddenly, it doesn’t seem impossible.

Scott Colom: Mississippi takes 145 years to send another black senator to Washington.